Sacred Landscapes


Book Description

Distant blue hills, soaring trees, vast cloudless skies—the majesty of nature has always had the power to lift the human spirit. For some it evokes a sense of timelessness and wonder. For others it reinforces religious convictions. And for many people today it raises concerns for the welfare of the planet. During the Renaissance, artists from Italy to Flanders and England to Germany depicted nature in their religious art to intensify the spiritual experience of the viewer. Devotional manuscripts for personal or communal use—from small-scale prayer books to massive choir books—were filled with some of the most illusionistic nature studies of this period. Sacred Landscapes, which accompanies an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, presents some of the most impressive examples of this art, gathering a wide range of illuminated manuscripts made between 1400 and 1600, as well as panel paintings, drawings, and decorative arts. Readers will see the influence of such masters as Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero della Francesca and will gain new appreciation for manuscript illuminators like Simon Bening, Joris Hoefnagel, Vincent Raymond, and the Spitz Master. These artists were innovative in the early development of landscape painting and were revered throughout the early modern period. The authors provide thoughtful examination of works from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.




The Absent Image


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.




A History of American Tonalism


Book Description

A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 will change standard theory on American art history with a new paradigm that places the origins of American modernism in the late 1870s. Crucially, it also demonstrates how the Tonalist movement became the driving force in the development of a distinctly American art form: mystic, visionary, and nostalgic, yet essentially modern in its progressive dynamic of non-narrative abstraction--a fundamentally expressive and symbolic art that set its seal on American art then and now. --Book Jacket.




Art in History/History in Art


Book Description

Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.




The Red Monastery Church


Book Description

This landmark, interdisciplinary publication of the Red Monastery church, the most important Christian monument in Egypt's Nile Valley, highlights its remarkable and newly conserved paintings and architectural sculpture.




Monet to Dalí


Book Description

This first comprehensive presentation of this collection from the Cleveland Museum of Art, includes paintings by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Boudin and Manet among other innovative artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist period. Each painting is presented with descriptions detailing the artist's motifs and context of the work in the Impressionist era. The title, with its essays and over 100 colour plates, provides a thorough focus of the dramatic artistic development of the century between 1850 and 1950 through the remarkable pieces of this collection. 100 colour Illustrations




Italy by Way of India


Book Description

The return of a saint's body to its rightful resting place was an event of civic and spiritual significance retold in Medieval sources and substantiated by artistic commissions. Legends of Saint Thomas Apostle, for instance, claimed that the martyred saint had been miraculously transported from India to Italy during the thirteenth century. However, Saint Thomas's purported resting place in Ortona, Italy did not become a major stopping point on pilgrimage or exploration routes, nor did this event punctuate frescoed life cycles or become a subject for Renaissance altarpieces as one would expect. Instead, the site of the apostle's burial in Chennai, India has flourished as a terminus of religious pilgrimage, where a multifaceted visual tradition emerged, and where a vibrant local cult of 'Thomas Christians' remains to this day. An unlikely destination on the edge of the 'known' world thus became a surprising source of early modern Christian piety. By studying the art and texts associated with this little-known cult, this book disrupts assumptions about how knowledge of Asia took shape during the Renaissance and challenges art historical paradigms in which art was crafted by locals merely to be exported, collected, and consumed by curious European patrons. In so doing, Italy by Way of India proposes that we redefine the parameters of early modern visual culture to account for the ways that global mobility and the circulation of objects profoundly influence how cultures see and know each other as well as themselves.




The Middle Ages in 50 Objects


Book Description

The extraordinary array of images included in this volume reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each section is organized chronologically, and every object is accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and cultural significance within the wider context in which the object was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and consider the significance of the objects and the history that they reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.




Black Art in Brazil


Book Description

An examination of the work of five contemporary Brazilian artists, specifically on how they focus on secular, race-related social challenges.




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